Lightning Knocks Amazon, Microsoft Euro Clouds Offline

Reports of a lightning strike in Dublin, Ireland have kept European sites using Amazon's EC2 cloud-computing program offline, as well as affecting users of Microsoft's BPOS hosted services.

Reports of a lightning strike in Dublin, Ireland have kept European sites using Amazon's EC2 cloud-computing program offline, as well as affecting users of Microsoft's BPOS hosted services.

The total outage could last between 24 and 48 hours.

Amazon said that lightning struck a transformer near its data center, causing an explosion and fire that knocked out utility service and left it unable to start its generators, resulting in a total power outage, according to Data Center Knowledge, which originally reported the story.

Based on Microsoft's Twitter feed, Microsoft's hosted online services were offline for about four hours, preventing access to its services for that time, based on a "power issue". The services appear to have been restored on Sunday.

Amazon, however, has had problems restoring its services, and has brought online additional capacity to bring its Amazon Elastic Block Services back online. Amazon also pointed the finger at EBS during its April outage. That outage began April 21, and persisted through April 24, when Amazon began reporting progress restoring the affected storage volumes.

"Due to the scale of the power disruption, a large number of EBS servers lost power and require manual operations before volumes can be restored," Amazon said at 11:04 PM on Sunday night. "Restoring these volumes requires that we make an extra copy of all data, which has consumed most spare capacity and slowed our recovery process. We've been able to restore EC2 instances without attached EBS volumes, as well as some EC2 instances with attached EBS volumes."

Amazon's data centers are isolated from one another, although the April outage caused problems in one facility to ripple over to another. That wasn't the problem on Sunday; the issue was that the latest outage will take time to completely repair and restore.

"While many volumes will be restored over the next several hours, we anticipate that it will take 24-48 hours until the process is completed," Amazon added. "In some cases EC2 instances or EBS servers lost power before writes to their volumes were completely consistent. Because of this, in some cases we will provide customers with a recovery snapshot instead of restoring their volume so they can validate the health of their volumes before returning them to service.

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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